Sonic Zombification
By Marguerite Adams
"Wee waan!" say the zonbis of Frankétienne's novel Dézafi, and little else.
Unlike the “living dead” zombies of contemporary popular culture, whose appetite for human brains is definitive, the Haitian zonbis of Frankétienne’s 1975 text do not explicitly declare hunger for anything at all. Instead, the zonbis of Dézafi are forced to labor on the Bouanèf plantation for the oungan Sintil, a vodou priest who not only exhumes and partially resuscitates humans from their graves, but subdues them into a state resembling death. Frankétienne portrays zombification as a process akin to hypnosis—one that targets consciousness—which shifts the emphasis of the book to a verb rather than a noun. It is the manipulated burial that both interrupts the death-and-life cycle as well as exposes the sociopolitical structures that enable people to subdue, to exhume, and to reanimate human beings. In other words, zombification is a process done unto a person, making monsters not out of the zombified victims, but the zombifier.
If we break down this process, it becomes clear that zombiehood is intricately tied to the mouth in ways beyond hunger. While George Romero’s 1968 film Night of the Living Dead and others in its wake have amplified the zombie’s cannibalistic appetite, the zombie has always, ultimately, been cast as speechless and monstrously other for its illegible vocalizations. If you are like me, the zombie is inescapably recognized by the monotonous groan with which the creature is often associated in Western contexts, inarticulate soundings that, supposedly, are intended to signal an absence of rational thought. [1]
The notion of speechlessness as indicator of inhumanity or otherness, of course, links back to ancient philosophical writings that concretized speech as distinct from voice, though the idea that one’s rational capacity is demonstrated linguistically transformed in profoundly racial and ableist ways through the advent of chattel slavery. [2] Hortense Spillers’ landmark 1987 essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” along with Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection (1997) and, more recently, Jennifer Morgan’s Reckoning with Slavery (2021) all demonstrate how the Middle Passage severed personhood from embodiment for Black captives, by simultaneously overdetermining the body’s (re)productive capacity and muting signs of refusal. [3] It is no surprise, then, that the notion of the zombie—those who are forced to labor “mindlessly,” or without articulable speech—originated through the rise of Haiti’s plantation economy. Yet, Dézafi’s unique soundscapes cannot be merely dismissed as illegible as the aforementioned colonial lineage would encourage. So, what are we to do with “wee waan”?
[Zora Neale Hurston, “Felicia Felix-Mentor, the Zombie,” 1938]
To find out, I talked to a friend of mine, Joslyn, who is a fluent French speaker and knowledgeable of Kreyòl. After meditating aloud for several minutes, where I detailed the phonetic resemblance between “wee waan” and “we want” or “we won” in English, and my reluctance to link the phrase to a comprehensible expression, she said that, to her, the phrase sounded like a baby’s cry. I remember my mouth fell open as I took in the implications of that connection: the zonbis under Sintil’s control are not merely persons reduced to their bodies, but are infantilized. Like newborns unable to articulate themselves but able to voice their affections, Dézafi’s zonbis are rendered speechless and, as consequence, barred from shaping the socioeconomic landscape of Bouanèf. At the same time, Bouanèf depends on the zonbis’ physical labor to sustain itself. In the process, Haitian zonbis are reduced to a blank slate upon which the zombifier can puppet and shape in their image. [4]
Joslyn’s connection made even more sense during a horrid scene where Sintil parades and beats a newly-transformed zonbi, Klodonis, through his neighborhood in a brutal exercise of power. To mock Klodonis, an educated man, Sintil instructs him “to shout out loud, ‘This is Klodonis passing through! This is Bouanèf’s philosopher passing through! This is Bouanèf’s insolent boy passing through!’” to which Klodonis vocalizes “through clenched teeth… ‘Wee! Waan! Wee! Waan! This is Klodonis passing through! Wake up to watch Klodonis passing through! It’s me Klodonis passing through!’” (62). As if he imagines Klodonis will learn and, in the future, know better than to flaunt his educated status, Sintil disciplines Klodonis by brandishing his tortured body and beaten voice through the village. This lesson’s orientation towards the future reveals how zombification takes maintenance, the continued disavowal of a people’s humanity, yet the performance also begs the question: if the zonbi cannot speak, why continue to suppress its voice?
If we attune more closely to the language above, we can see the slippages of this suppressive schema. Instead of parroting an exact replica of Sintil’s jeering words, Klodonis not only states his presence but commands that the townsfolk “wake up” to witness him passing through. A running motif throughout the novel is Sintil’s insistence that salted food be kept from the zonbis lest they are revived from their nullified state. Ingesting salt would “wake up” the zonbis, so Sintil’s dietary dictums are essential for ensuring they remain submissive. “Wake up,” coming from Klodonis’ mouth, then becomes a mandate to attend to the violence that forms the basis of Bouanèf’s socioeconomic reality. Klodonis’ slightly altered speech beckons for his community to acknowledge both that he is passing through and how he is passing through—under Sintil’s grotesque handling. He even states, “It’s me!” as if to rearticulate his tenuous self-possession, which seems to be thinning the longer he is under Sintil’s control. Moreover, he says all this “through clenched teeth,” as if struggling against complete subordination.
Thus, while zonbis are subdued, Klodonis’ reaction suggests a fissure in the absolute control of Sintil. This indicates that zombiehood is a condition that takes maintenance—perpetual suppression—in order to persist. As Kaiama Glover says in Haiti Unbound, “The fact that these depersonalized beings must be actively and aggressively kept in line by their oppressors subtly affirms the non-absoluteness of their subjugation” (67-68).
As an echo of enslavement, zombiehood shows us that, despite its caricatures in Western media and contortions from Haitian vodou practices, those who are rendered monstrous are not without socioeconomic influence. In fact, capitalist societies depend on the extractive labor of the zombified in order to flourish. Klodonis’ “wake up,” and even the zonbis’ key phrase “wee waan,” is a call not just to his neighbors but to Frankétienne’s readers as well. His utterances, along with the plethora of voices that make up the polyphonic chorus of the novel, gesture towards a larger zombified societal schema where our lives under oppressive regimes, bred from antiquated notions of speech, is akin to zombiedom.
While he may be speechless, Klodonis is not voiceless; that Klodonis can leverage his voice in subversive, circuitous routes around Sintil’s commands unbeknownst to (or at least unremarked upon by) Sintil is a clear indication of how expressing one’s humanity cannot be confined to the realm of articulable speech. So, while the meaning of “wee waan” may go on opaquely, that the sounds are spoken at all presents socioeconomic force nonetheless. Whether a baby’s cry, a siren, a distorted “we want,” or, as Joslyn and I discovered digging into dictionary after dictionary, “Yes, King” (“wi wa a”), the zonbis’ call gestures towards an insatiable appetite for recognition—or, perhaps, re-cognition.
Notes
[1] For more work on the racist and ableist implications of speechlessness, see Derefe Kimarley Chevannes. “Meditations on Blackness and Disability.” Caliban’s Readings (27 Jan 2024); Nina Sun Eidsheim. The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019; and Sarah Juliet Lauro and Karen Embry. “A Zombie Manifesto: The Nonhuman Condition in the Era of Advanced Capitalism.” In Zombie Theory: A Reader. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2017: 395-412.
[2] Chevannes work is helpful here again, particularly discussing Aristotle’s Politics in relation to political speech. See Derefe Kimarley Chevannes. “The Haitian Revolution and Afromodernity: Political Speech, Euromodernity & Black Universalism.” Theory & Event 26:2 (2023): 318–344.
[3] See Sowande’ M. Mustakeem. Slavery At Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2016. This monograph acutely locates the myriad manifestations of how the human body became a vessel for capitalist gain aboard the slave ship and how revolt was thwarted by sea-faring enslavers.
[4] See Homi K. Bhabha. “Of Mimicry and Man: The ambivalence of colonial discourse.” The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994. This chapter provides insight into the molding of colonial subjects in the oppressor’s image.
References
Frankétienne. Dézafi. Trans. Asselin Charles. Charlottesville, VI: University of Virginia Press, 2018.
Glover, Kaiama L. Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2010.
Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Morgan, Jennifer Lyle. Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021.
Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17:2 (1987): 65–81.
Cover Photo Credit: Frankétienne, “Tenderness,” 2007.
Marguerite (Margy) Adams is a Black feminist literary scholar, Centennial Scholar, and PhD candidate in the department of English at Emory University. She combines Black performance theory, sound studies, and humor studies to investigate literary and cultural constructions of race, queerness, gender, and language in Black American and Afro-Caribbean literature, giving specific attention to how knowledge is produced through and around laughter. As a digital and public humanist, Margy’s scholarship also considers the ways digital technologies cohere with Black compositional practices and what their practical interfaces reveal. Margy works at Emory’s Center for Digital Scholarship as a digital scholarship associate with specializations in aural and visual design, and she also co-created and co-runs Emory’s Black Feminist Working Group.